Ugh... my head....
Did I drink too much champagne in a fit of anger...?
Forgetting that fruit wine gives you a brutal hangover the next day was the price I paid.
Wait.
Then why is this chair so hard, and why can’t I move my hands? Am I sleep-paralyzed or something?
I tried shifting my body around, and strangely enough, my shoulders moved.
At that moment, all my memories came flooding back.
I had opened the door in high spirits, thinking I was about to dunk the chicken girl into the cheese, but the last thing I remembered was not cheese at all—it was the face of a familiar enemy from the other side.
Just as my memories finished coming back, the door to this sealed room opened and light spilled in.
"How do you feel? Commander of Azur Lane."
That sultry, sly voice was....
"You’re Prinz Oi, aren’t you."
She wasn’t wearing a blindfold, so I couldn’t see her expression, but from the off-beat sound of her breathing, she seemed a little flustered.
But Oi quickly erased that sign of surprise and spoke to me again.
"H...heh. Not bad. Yeah, I’m the one who brought you here."
Oi removed my blindfold.
Right. She was the one who had dragged me here.
You bastard. Interrupting my last supper.
"So... why did the Commander of Azur Lane board a train headed for enemy territory? And without any escort, too. I thought it was a trap, but apparently not... I checked the intercepted communications, and there doesn’t seem to be any movement to find you either. There are too many suspicious parts to count."
Oi put a foot on my crotch and issued a vicious warning.
"If anything you say sounds like a lie to me, I’ll cripple your sex life for good."
Hurk..........
Suddenly I thought of some middle-aged guy in a blue hospital gown, his face twisted in a grimace.
Cold.
A dagger flew into my chest and lodged there.
"First. Why did you get on a train headed for an enemy nation? What was your purpose?"
"Uh.... I’m not the Commander of Azur Lane anymore."
"......"
Instead of answering, Oi pressed down harder with the foot on my crotch.
"Aaaagh!!! It’s true!!#^@^/%(₩!!!"
"Revise your statement. That doesn’t make sense."
Yeah, fair enough. I also think it doesn’t make sense.
But revise my statement? What am I, some commander from the next town over?
"No... seriously... I don’t know what time it is now, but normally, if I disappeared, there’d be an emergency within an hour at the latest. But you said the intercepted communications were quiet."
"They could be deceiving us by using another communications channel."
So when did our communications get compromised? Information was leaking everywhere... damn it. After all that effort I put into communication security....
I pushed my complicated feelings aside and answered again.
"As far as I know, there isn’t another channel. Setting up a new one would take a lot of time and money."
Prinz Oi eased off the pressure on my crotch a little.
Then she put a finger to her lips and fell into thought for a long while.
"Then why the hell did you come to enemy territory while the war’s still going on?"
"Sigh..... well, you see...."
I told her everything that had happened.
How I had tried to completely wipe out Iron Blood. How I had fought against opposition from the Royal upper ranks and the Northern Parliament, only to be called a cowardly bastard by the Royal Knights and asked what I had ever done for them, until in the end the Northern Parliament and the Royal Navy led my impeachment and kicked me out of Azur Lane.
"...So I was on my way to Germany to help you guys, so I could get revenge on them."
Prinz Oi listened to my story in silence, then burst out laughing.
"Kyahahahahahaha! You’re seriously.... kyahahaha!"
After laughing her fill, Oi wiped away the tears that had come out from laughing too hard and threw a cutting remark at me.
"You’re crazy, aren’t you?"
What?! Crazy?! Hey, I ate meals with your boss, right? Huh? We went to the sauna together too! We did everything!!
But the situation I was in didn’t exactly allow for that kind of outburst.
And honestly, who wouldn’t think like this after being kicked out?
So I simply stayed quiet.
"........"
Oi looked at me with a grin and said,
"Stay here and keep quiet. I’ll be back."
Then she left.
...
Even as Oi walked down the corridor, she was full of questions.
Even if the momentum had tilted heavily to their side, this was still a wartime situation, so why had they cast out their own commander?
At first, she thought it was a trap.
But there was no reason to set a trap using such an important figure, and the commander didn’t seem to be lying either.
As she thought it over, Oi reached her destination.
When she opened the door and stepped inside, there was the leader of their group, Bismarck, bandaged in several places and looking out the window.
"Haah..... Bismarck. I think we got the wrong address."
Bismarck only turned her head to look at Oi.
"What do you mean?"
After hearing the whole story, Bismarck lowered her head and fell into thought.
"I should go see him myself."
Bismarck moved her body with visible effort.
"Are you sure you’re okay?"
"...I need to see it for myself... so I can clear up these questions."
...
I pulled my dazed mind back together at the sound of footsteps beyond the door.
Creak—
"You are....."
The person who opened the door and came in was Oi, along with someone wrapped in bandages in several places and relying on a wheelchair.
Yes, that was definitely Bismarck, who had been reported sunk.
"Bismarck... I was told you’d been sunk."
"Unfortunately, I’m still alive."
Bismarck pushed her wheelchair closer to me.
Then she simply stared at me.
"...Did you really come here to help us?"
"Yeah. Honestly, I had nowhere else to go."
"Even if it wasn’t here, you could have used your reputation to go somewhere better and more comfortable. So why here?"
I closed my eyes.
The biggest reason I had decided to defect was that I was sick and tired of the place I’d belonged to. And I wanted to watch them crumble under the consequences of their own choices.
I told Bismarck exactly how I felt.
After hearing me out, Bismarck stared at my face for a long time again.
Then, at last, she spoke.
"Welcome to the Iron Blood... and to the Red Axis."
"...Bismarck. Are you serious?"
Oi asked back, looking at Bismarck.
"We’ve already come this far. It’ll be hard to get out now, and humans can’t stand up to our strength. If he does anything suspicious, we can deal with him then. And we needed a commander anyway, didn’t we? And besides...."
"We have nowhere left to retreat to."
Prinz Oi pressed her lips together and looked only at me.
"So, Commander. Please.... lead us."
Bismarck took my hand with trembling fingers.
"Oi, untie the Commander. He’s our commander now, so treat him accordingly."
Without a word, Oi removed the handcuffs and shackles binding me.
I stood up, stretching out my stiff body after sitting in one position for too long.
...
The first thing I did after becoming commander was have a uniform made.
There was no way I could keep wearing the enemy’s clothes, so I had one tailored based on the outfits worn by the Red Axis factions.
And I needed a cipher system.
Back when I was in Azur Lane, the Red Axis’ codes could be intercepted as easily as anything if you tried.
That was one of the reasons their operations so often failed and their outlook kept growing darker.
I wandered around this base, which I was seeing for the first time, asking Oi all sorts of things.
Then, in the warehouse, I found something that looked like a typewriter.
"What’s this?"
"That’s a game console Bismarck made for U-556."
"A game console? How do you use it?"
"I don’t know either. Only Bismarck and U-556 know."
My curiosity piqued, I turned it on and started pressing things.
But something seemed off.
When I pressed the V key, the V key should have lit up, but instead a different letter lit up.
"Looks broken. Just leave it."
Oi tried to pull my arm and lead me somewhere else.
"Wait.... this...."
Maybe I had just discovered something incredible.
"Take me to Bismarck."
...
I took the mysterious typewriter to Bismarck.
When I knocked on the door, after a few seconds I was told to come in. She must have been deep in thought.
"Bismarck. Can you explain how this works?"
"This is...."
Bismarck looked at me in slight surprise.
She personally explained how to operate it.
"I’d forgotten about it... where did you find it?"
"It was covered in dust in the warehouse."
"I see...."
Bismarck gave a bitter smile.
But I couldn’t hide my own smile, because I felt like I had found something extraordinary.
"Bismarck. You made this, didn’t you?"
"Yeah... why?"
"You’re a genius."
...
The name of this machine was Enigma. In Greek, it means a riddle.
To explain how it works in simple terms: say I press ㄱ. The machine doesn’t output ㄱ—it outputs ㅌ instead. The completed text looks strange, almost like it isn’t from any language in this world, but anyone with the decryption device can decode it.
And the dials on top can be turned to change the arrangement.
I decided to adopt this amazing machine as our cipher system.
Now the problem was mass production.
If I were still in Azur Lane, I could have asked Vestal to mass-produce the machines, but there was no one in Iron Blood who could do that for us.
Going all the way across the sea to Sakura Empire to request help was far too risky.
Oi, the one person I was closest to, was a complete disaster with machines, and Bismarck.... wasn’t in any condition to handle it.
But as if God were on my side, the person who could do it appeared before me before long.
"Ah, Hipper."
Oi, who had been walking behind me, waved and ran forward.
"I told you not to cling to me!"
A sharp voice rang out from far away.
"Commander, that’s my older sister, Admiral Hipper."
"Uh... hi...?"
When I greeted her, Hipper looked me up and down and snapped,
"Huh... you’re our commander? You, who look so utterly unremarkable?"
What was with this rude brat, throwing insults at a first meeting?
I’d show her who was on top.
"And you let Iron Blood get dragged into this state after being beaten so thoroughly by someone who looks so unremarkable?"
"....What?"
Hipper, who had been turning away, stopped and looked at me with murder in her eyes.
"What did you just say?"
"I mean, you got beaten by someone this unremarkable...."
When I opened my eyes again, Hipper had me by the collar.
"Don’t go around saying whatever you want just because you have a mouth."
"Do you still not know who I am?"
Hipper tightened her grip on my collar.
"No, I don’t. Who are you to call yourself our commander without permission?"
"Oi didn’t tell you?"
Oi sighed and tried to calm Hipper down.
"Hipper. Stop. You look ridiculous."
"You shut up, Oi!"
"Hipper, the person you’re grabbing by the collar is our commander."
"I never agreed to have this guy as my commander. And what? Who are you to talk about Iron Blood’s situation like that?"
Wasn’t I going to die if I told her who I really was?
But Oi neatly solved that worry for me.
"Hipper. We’ve been toyed with by the person you’re grabbing by the collar this whole time."
".....What do you mean?"
"Haah..."
I let out a sigh.
It was because I couldn’t imagine what her reaction would be if I said, I was the Commander of Azur Lane!
No matter. Just say it and see what happens.
"I used to be the commander of Azur Lane."
".....What?"
The strength went out of Hipper’s hand on my collar.
"Yes. I’m the person you all wanted to wipe out so badly—the one who used to be the Commander of Azur Lane."
Hipper stared at me blankly.
"Not anymore. I’ll explain it in detail later, but I’m no longer affiliated with Azur Lane. I’m a member of the Red Axis now."
"...Why?"
"Huh?"
"Why did you come here...?"
Questions, questions, more questions. At this rate I’d have to gather everyone and give a speech. We hadn’t even had an inauguration yet.
I explained the whole story to Hipper too.
"I can’t understand it. Even so, you just turned against them?"
Go ahead and hear that from the people you fed and raised all this time.
You’d feel the rage boiling up from your very core.
"You wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t know what it feels like to have the people you trusted stab you in the back."
Oi looked at me with a slightly pitying expression.
Come to think of it, Hipper had a wrench in her hand.
"Hm? Hipper. Do you know how to handle machines?"
Hipper lifted the wrench in her hand and said,
"Hmph. It’s not just that I know how. I’m good at it."
Was this what it felt like when a professor found a useful grad student...?
"Work with me."
...
After Hipper learned how to make Enigma from Bismarck, she and I locked ourselves in the workshop and poured everything we had into mass-producing them.
"Are you sure the gear goes in here? It won’t fit right!"
"Then check it yourself. This is the right place."
"It’s not the right place, you idiot! Are your eyes just for decoration?"
Like that, Hipper and I bickered while we cranked out Enigmas.
At first, we weren’t used to it and our pace was slow, but as we made one after another, we got faster and faster, until we were just churning them out.
But no matter how used to it we got, there was a limit when everything was being done by hand.
"We can’t fully equip Iron Blood in a short time with just our own hands."
"Hmm....."
I thought about it carefully.
"Then let’s run an operation to test Enigma’s security while we’re at it. It’d be a waste if we built all this and it turned out to be useless."
But before that, we needed to let everyone know that Iron Blood now had a new commander.
I held a meeting with Oi and Hipper in Bismarck’s hospital room.
"Wouldn’t it be better to hide the fact that the commander used to belong to Azur Lane? There might be people like Hipper who would oppose him."
Hipper, suddenly hearing her name, turned her head.
"Hmph..."
Oi was in favor of hiding the fact that I had once belonged to Azur Lane.
But I had a different opinion.
It would come out eventually, and it was better to reveal it now than later.
Of course, by then it might be possible to brush it off without issue.
But if I hid the fact that I had been part of Azur Lane, my career would disappear. And having no career as a commander would affect the credibility of our operations.
Think about it. A man who had once made a name for himself as an enemy was now our ally. How reassuring would that be?
Of course, that would require the endorsement of someone trustworthy.
So I planned to have Bismarck vouch for me.
If the spiritual pillar and leader of Iron Blood said, "Yeah, he’s one of us now," then trust in me would shoot up, and it would be much easier to blend in afterward.
I prepared a speech.
The speech was packed with provocative lines that would reignite the flames in those already soaked in defeat and frustration.
Yes, just like that art student from the old days.
And at last, the day approached when we would fire the signal flare for the revival of the Iron Blood—and of the Red Axis as a whole.
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